Che Guevara in Africa

Introduction:

Brazzaville has long been a strategic place in the Franco-

African system, an epicenter of global struggles in Africa
in a Cold War context, and a hub of revolutionary
movements. Che Guevara has stayed there. His first visit
to Brazaville via Lusaka was in April 1963. The Congo is,
in a way, a laboratory of social demands. And in Kinshasa,
Kigali, Bangui, Libreville or elsewhere, everyone was
wondering what was going to happen in Brazzaville. On
August 13, 14 and 15, 1963 the revolution broke out. I had
the occasion to encounter briefly Che Guevara at the
airport of Lusaka end April 1963 on my way to a military
academy in Belgium after been a voluntary in the Katanga
Gendarmerie from 1961 until 1963. One year later I would
be on the same places as Rip Robertson and some of his
men and see the Makasi pilots in action.

This is a publication about the presence of Che in the Congo.

When Fidel Castro died in November 2016 it prompted

many to revisit the extraordinary history of the Cuban
Revolution, and in particular the diplomatic recognition,
political support, and military assistance provided by
Cuba under Castro to national liberation struggles and
independent states all over Africa from Algeria and
Western Sahara, to Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zanzibar, and the
Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and
Mozambique.
Cuban soldiers victories against South African forces in
Angola in 197576 and again in 198788 played a crucial
role in the successful struggles against white rule in
Namibia and in South Africa itself.

The earliest Cuban aid effort went to the 1961 Algerian

liberation movement when Castro sent a large
consignment of American weapons captured during the
abortive Bay of Pigs (Playa Girn) invasion by the brigade
2506 under the command of William Robertson. After
the Algerians won independence in July 1962, they
reciprocated by helping train a group of Argentinian
guerrillas, even sending two agents with the guerrillas
from Algiers to Bolivia in June 1963. Two years later,
Cuba provided systematic support to a potentially
revolutionary movement by sending an elite group of
volunteer guerrillas, the vast majority of them black, to
the eastern Congo. Che Guevara was among them.

Congolese Independence

Following independence from Belgium in June 1960, the

Congo elected left-wing Prime Minister Patrice
Lumumba. Soon after, the army mutinied; the mineral-
rich Katanga province, under Mose Tshombe, seceded;
the Belgian troops returned; and, finally, at Lumumbas
request, United Nations peacekeeping forces arrived to
protect the countrys territorial integrity and his new
government.
When Lumumba asked for additional military assistance
from the Soviets, President Kasavubu supported by
Commander in Chief Joseph Mobutu deposed him.
After Lumumbas murder and UN secretary general Dag
Hammarskjolds death in a plane crash, the Congo
descended into further chaos.

By early 1964, Cyrille Adoula, weak and unpopular, was

trying to lead the country. As the UN withdrew, four
different rebellions broke out, most operating under a
leftist umbrella group called the National Liberation
Council. Since Adoula had shut down the official
parliament, this opposition coalition had effectively
replaced it.

Gaston Soumaliot led the movement in the countrys

northeast his lieutenant Laurent Kabila orchestrated a
related group further south. For a few weeks in mid-1964,
these forces controlled much of the Congos eastern
region. One of Lumumbas former colleagues, Christophe
Gbenye, had taken control of much of the rest of the
country with backing from China and the Soviet Union.

In March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent Averell

Harriman to the capital, Leopoldville-Kinshasa, to assess
the situation. With Cyrus Vance, the deputy defense
secretary, Harriman drew up plans for an American airlift,
which began May. In July, Mose Tshombe seized power,
replacing the ineffective Adoula, and called for help from
the United States, Belgium, and South Africa.
They heeded his call, and Belgian officers and white
mercenaries from Rhodesia and South Africa reinforced
the Congolese military. Its immediate task was to crush
Gbenyes rebellion, which had established a government
in Stanleyville-Kisangani. In November, the United
Kingdom joined the effort, allowing Belgian paratroopers
to be flown in by US planes from its South Atlantic base
on Ascension Island. The newly elected Labor
government under Harold Wilson approved the action.
Paratroopers landed on Stanleyville at the same time the
white mercenaries arrived.

Guevara Looks to Africa

In response to these Western interventions, a group of

radical African states, led by Algeria and Egypt,
announced that they would supply the Congolese rebels
with arms and troops. They called on others for help, and
the Cuban government announced it would oblige.

In December, Guevara already one of the most

internationally oriented members of the Cuban leadership
gave an impassioned speech at the UN General
Assembly. He referred to the tragic case of the Congo
and denounced the Western powers unacceptable
intervention, referring to Belgian paratroopers, carried
by US planes, who took off from British bases.

Guevara then embarked on a tour of African states,

visiting Algeria, then Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Senegal,
Ghana, Dahomey, Egypt, and finally Tanzania.
In Dar Es Salaam, he met Laurent Kabila, who sought his
help maintaining the liberated areas in the Congos east
and southeast; in Cairo, he met Gaston Soumaliot, who
wanted men and money for the Stanleyville front; and in
Brazzaville, he met Agostinho Neto, who requested
Cuban support for the Angolan liberation army, the
Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(MPLA). Guevara was excited by these potentially
effective liberation struggles and the role Cuba could play
in them.

In February 1965, he flew to Beijing to see what help the

Peoples Republic of China might provide for the
Congolese rebellions. There he met Chou En Lai, who had
taken his own tour of ten African countries between
December 1963 and February 1964. Soon after meeting
Che, Chou made a second visit to Algiers and Cairo,
where he may have met the Congolese rebel leaders. In
June, he flew to Tanzania, where he certainly had an
audience with both Kabila and Soumaliot.

In the meanwhile, Guevara himself went back to Cairo to

discuss his plan to lead a group of guerrillas with Colonel
Nasser. According to an account of the meeting from
Nassers son-in-law Mohammed Heikal, the Egyptian
leader advised Guevara not to become another Tarzan.
It cant be done, he said.
Guevara did not heed the warning; he was already fully
committed to applying his experience with the Cuban
Revolutions success to movements all over the world. He
returned to Cuba, where he was greeted by Castro.
This was the last time he would be seen again in public
until after his death two and a half years later in Bolivia.

Before leaving Cuba, Che wrote a farewell letter to Castro

which was read out in public in Havana six months
later, in October declaring he would extend the Cuban
Revolutions influence: other nations are calling for the
aid of my modest efforts. . . . I have always identified
myself with the foreign policy of our Revolution, and I
continue to do so. He now felt that his destiny called for
him to export the revolution and lead a guerrilla
movement in Africa.

Disorder on the Front

The decision to intervene in the Congo had already been

made before Che returned to Havana. An elite group of
volunteers, all black, had been recruited at the beginning
of the year and underwent training at three different camps
in Cuba. The plan was for one contingent of Cubans to
travel in small detachments to Tanzania and across Lake
Tanganyika into North Katanga; a second contingent
named the Patrice Lumumba Battalion would fly to a
base near Brazzaville, just across the Congo River from
Leopoldville-Kinshasa, the capital of Congo.

Captain Victor Dreke a Cuban of African descent

would lead the smaller eastern column, which comprised
150 guerrillas, including Guevara himself. Che later wrote
to Castro that his captain was . . . one of the pillars on
which I relied.
The only reason I am not recommending that he be
promoted is that he already holds the highest rank. Jorge
Risquet Valdes Santana, a member of the central
committee of the Cuban Communist Party, was to head up
the Patrice Lumumba Battalion.

On April 1, 1965, after a final meeting with Castro at the

guerrilla base in Havana, Guevara flew with a small
advance guard first to Moscow and then to Cairo, and on
to Dar es Salaam. The new Cuban ambassador, Pablo
Rivalta, greeted Guevara and his soldiers at the airport
outside Dar es Salaam. Guevara worried that their arrival
would draw the CIAs notice, but the Americans had just
withdrawn their ambassador from Tanzania and were
otherwise occupied. Unfortunately, the Congolese rebel
leadership also paid them little attention. Kabila and
Soumaliot were meeting other leaders in Cairo to try and
reduce the political divisions within their movement, and
only relatively junior personnel were available to
Guevara.

Cubas preparations for their intervention were as we

have seen thorough; but they clearly overestimated the
level of cooperation they would receive from the rebel
leadership itself. Nevertheless, on April 22, 1965,
Guevara and his comrades set off from Dar es Salaam for
Lake Tanganyika, drove south, and established a supply
base in the lakeside town of Kigoma, near the village of
Ujiji where David Livingstone and Henry Stanley had
met nearly a century before.
We dont know whether Guevara was aware of Ujijis
place in the history of African imperialism when he
established his anti-imperialist base in Kigoma.

After crossing the lake, the Cubans met a well-armed

detachment of the Peoples Liberation Army and started a
seven-month campaign in what pro-Tshombe mercenary
leader Colonel Mike Hoare named the Fizi Baraka
pocket of resistance, an area that covered over sixteen
thousand square miles. More Cubans arrived in dribs and
drabs between April and October. During this period, the
Cubans and the Congolese explored the terrain, and the
Cubans began assessing their enemies and their allies
strengths and weaknesses.

They noted that the enemys forward bases were well

defended, supported by small aircraft and white
mercenaries; they also noted that the Congolese rebels
were suffering from low morale. They regarded their
leaders, including Kabila, as strangers or, more
pejoratively, as tourists. The local commanders spent
days drinking and then had huge meals without disguising
what they were up to from the people around them. They
used up petrol on pointless expeditions.

On June 7, in an unexplained accident, Leonard

Mitoudidi, the most senior rebel leader present Kabila
was still in Dar es Salaam drowned in Lake
Tanganyika.
Soon, instructions came down from Kabila that the
Cubans should organize an attack on the Bendera
garrison, which was defending a hydroelectric plant.
Guevara did not agree with the plan but decided to go
ahead anyway. On June 20, a combined force of Cubans,
Congolese, and Tutsis (some of whom originally came
from Rwanda) set off and carried out the attack, as
requested. Many of the Tutsis ran away, the Congolese
refused to take part, and four Cubans were killed,
revealing to the enemy that Cuba was now involved in the
rebellion on the ground. The Cubans considered this
operation to be not only a failure but a disaster. Mercenary
leader Mike Hoare, on the other hand, was impressed. In
his memoirs, he noted:

Observers had noticed a subtle change in the type of resistance

which the rebels were offering the Leopoldville government. . .
. The change coincided with the arrival in the area of a
contingent of Cuban advisers specially trained in the arts of
guerrilla warfare.

At this point, the Cubans felt depressed and disillusioned.

They had all now been ill at one time or another since their
arrival; Guevara himself suffered from bouts of asthma
and malaria.
Their small military successes like the ambush of a
group of mercenaries in August seemed negligible, and
the political climate was undoubtedly deteriorating.
Differences between the rebel factions and their leaders
seemed to be coming to a head, and a coup detat in
Algeria changed the balance of forces. Ben Bella, one of
Guevaras principal supporters, was replaced by army
commander Houari Boumedienne, who wanted to reduce
the international communitys commitment to the
Congolese rebellion.

Although Guevara noted the low morale, the lack of

progress, and the shifting political climate, he kept his
concerns to himself. When Soumaliot went to Havana
early in September 1965, he convinced Castro the
revolution was going well. Cuban guerrillas continued to
arrive in Tanzania. Also, despite the odds, the Cuban
training must have counted for something. As Hoare
recorded later:

The enemy were very different from anything we had ever met
before. They wore equipment, employed normal field tactics,
and answered to whistle signals. They were obviously being led
by trained officers. We intercepted wireless messages in
Spanish . . . and it seemed clear that the defense . . . was being
organized by Cubans.

But by October, the Cubans and their Congolese allies

found themselves on the back foot.
The combined forces of the white mercenaries and
Tshombes troops were advancing in a counter-offensive.
Guevara retreated to their base camp at Luluabourg and
expected a long, last resistance. Events, however, proved
as unpredictable as ever.
Changing Ground

President Kasavubu began to recognize that he would

never get approval from the Organization of African
Unity (OAU) if Tshombe continued as prime minister, so
he replaced him with Evariste Kimba.

For a moment, it looked like the revolution would be

saved. In reality, however, the end of Tshombes regime
presaged a political reconciliation effort that would
eventually undermine the rebellion, ending the support it
had been receiving from African states. On October 23,
1965, Kasavubu attended a meeting of African heads of
state in Accra, presided over by Ghanas Kwame
Nkrumah. Kasavubu announced that the rebellion was
virtually over and that he would be sending the white
mercenaries home. This sufficed to convince many
African leaders. It also represented a signal defeat for the
radical African states, allowing a more conservative
alliance to coalesce within the OAU.

On November 11, 1965, sensing that the climate now

favored him, Ian Smith, the white Rhodesian leader,
unilaterally declared independence from the United
Kingdom.
In South Africa, a renewed attack on the African National
Congress effectively crushed the mass movement against
apartheid for half a decade, and the Portuguese were
encouraged to maintain their grip on Angola,
Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau for another decade.
Meanwhile, Ben Bella had already been overthrown;
Nkrumah was removed from power while on a visit to
China in early 1966; and Ben Barka the radical
Moroccan leader who had been organizing Cubas Tri-
Continental Conference, a gathering of international
revolutionary movements to be held in Havana in January
1966 was kidnapped and murdered.

Back in the Congo, Mike Hoare heard about Kasavubus

speech and flew to Leopoldville to see Mobutu in person.
The general was furious, he recalls, he had not been
consulted . . . and felt bitter in consequence. The new
Prime Minister, Evariste Kimba Muondo, had to make a
statement explaining that no mercenaries would go home
until the Congo was thoroughly pacified.

Guevara was also struggling with the turning political

tide. On November 1, 1965, he received an urgent
message from Dar es Salaam warning him that the
Tanzanian government had decided to end the Cuban
expeditionary force. President Nyerere, all too aware of
the feuds within the Congolese leadership and concerned
about its implications, felt he had little choice.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Guevara considered

staying behind with twenty well-chosen men,
continuing the fight until the movement developed or until
its possibilities were exhausted. He asked for help from
China, and Chou En Lai advised him to continue building
resistance groups but not to enter combat himself.
Guevara himself entertained the idea, at the end, of
making a forced march across the Congo to join forces
with Muleles rebels in Kwilu, but he did not receive
backing for such a wild notion.

On November 20, Guevara organized the crossing of Lake

Tanganyika back into Tanzania. All the Congolese
leaders, he wrote, were in full retreat, the peasants had
become increasingly hostile. He recognized that such a
situation made the continued presence of the Cuban
guerrillas pointless. Others agreed. Years later, Castro
would say:

In the end it was the revolutionary leaders of the Congo who

took the decision to stop the fight. . . . In practice, this decision
was correct; we had verified that the conditions for the
development of this struggle, at that particular moment, did not
exist.

Whether that was indeed the case remains debatable. In

any case, after a few days in Dar es Salaam, most of the
Cubans flew home via Moscow.

To Another Front

Victor Dreke returned to Cuba to head a military unit

preparing internationalist volunteers; in 1966, he led the
Cuban military mission to Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde,
where he served alongside Amlcar Cabral.* He
performed a similar function in the Republic of Guinea.
* In 1978 the son of Amilcar Cabral, the young Fernando Diaz Cabral lived for a while
in our house (Breda) as a guest. He was a student at the academy of arts in Breda.
In 1979 he invited me to spend some weeks in Guinea Bissau where his uncle Diaz
Cabral was president. (Victor E. Rosez)
He returned to Guinea-Bissau in 1986, heading Cubas
military mission there until 1989.

Jorge Risquet became head of the Cuban Civil

Internationalist Mission in the Peoples Republic of
Angola between 1975 and 1979, eventually leading fifty-
five thousand Cuban troops against the CIA-supported
South African Defense Forces. Other members of
Guevaras guerrilla force also returned to Africa to fight.
Che Guevara did not return to Cuba with his comrades.
He remained in the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam to
write his account of the Congolese campaign. Early in
1966, he traveled to Prague, where he stayed for several
months. He finally returned to Cuba, where he secretly
helped prepare the expeditionary force that would
establish itself in eastern Bolivia in November 1966.
While in the eastern Congo, Guevara formally accepted
the number-three position, in Bolivia, he insisted on
openly leading the force. This combined with the fact
that the revolutionary left in Bolivia was deeply divided
as a result of the Sino-Soviet dispute meant that his
guerrillas received little support from the largely
Moscow-aligned Bolivian Communist Party, leaving
them desperately isolated.

In March 1967, only three months after they had arrived,

the Bolivian government forces discovered the Cubans
and their local allies and obliged them to fight. With
virtually no external support, the band slowly dwindled in
numbers, and its morale ebbed away. In October 1967,
Guevara was captured and shot.
From one perspective, we might see Ches decision to
fight on against hopeless odds in Bolivia as evidence that
he learned nothing from his experiences in the Congo.
From another, we might argue that he had already planned
something like this back in the Congo, when he
considered staying behind. He even may have made up his
mind back in April 1965, when he wrote his letter to
Castro renouncing his positions in the party leadership,
his ministry post, his rank of comandante, and his Cuban
citizenship. He was, after all, an Argentinian and had
always been, to a certain extent, an outsider.

He was also an idealist who had traveled widely on his

motorbike in Latin America as a young doctor, becoming
familiar with how poor people lived. He believed that
revolutionary action could improve their lives, and his
participation in the Cuban Revolutions extraordinary
success showed him what a few determined people could
achieve. Before he left for the Congo, Guevara wrote to
his parents: Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of
Rocinante.

This image of Guevara as a twentieth-century Don

Quixote, setting out on his ancient horse to revive
chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world,
who, against all odds and despite a series of disastrous
encounters, survives with spirit undiminished until the
very end appeals to the romantic in all those who see
themselves as revolutionaries. But the Cuban
intervention in the Congo was not undertaken lightly, or
without serious preparation; and the divisions within the
various Congolese movements and the failings of their
leadership, although very real, did not seem to the Cuban
leadership, at least at first, to be insurmountable.

Whatever the situation on the ground in the Congo, it

was, arguably, the changing political environment in
Africa as a whole, and particularly the withdrawal of
support by President Nyerere of Tanzania for the Cuban
expeditionary force, that adversely affected the situation
facing Guevara and his guerrillas. Furthermore, it is clear
that the decision to abort the mission was not taken by
Guevara alone, as Castro noted years later.
Guevara, however, remained heroically, if tragically,
optimistic regarding his capacity to contribute to
revolution elsewhere. Representatives of Mozambiques
independence movement, the Mozambique Liberation
Front (FRELIMO), reported, for example, that they met
with Guevara in late 1966 in Dar es Salaam regarding his
offer to aid in their revolutionary project, an offer which
they ultimately rejected.

As Guevara secretly prepared for Bolivia, he wrote a last

letter to his five children to be read upon his death, which
ended with him instructing them: Above all, always be
capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against
anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful
qualit in a revolutionary.
Tatu or number three in East Congo